1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an ink jet recording apparatus and to a recording method therefor.
2. Background Art
Conventionally, there is known an ink jet recording apparatus which discharges an ink droplet from a nozzle provided in a recording head to perform recording on a recording medium. Among such ink jet recording apparatus, an ink jet recording apparatus which uses ink containing a volatile component and causes the volatile component to vaporize on a recording medium to thereby fix the ink onto the recording medium is widely used.
Further, when an ambient temperature in which the ink jet recording apparatus is used is high, or when the ink jet recording apparatus is continuously used, the temperature of the recording head becomes higher, and thus, in those cases, the temperature of ink in the nozzle also becomes higher.
In an ink jet recording apparatus which uses ink containing a volatile component, when the temperature of ink in the nozzle becomes higher, the volatile component in the ink vaporizes more, and thus, the viscosity of the ink in the nozzle increases. Therefore, discharge of ink from the recording head becomes unstable and recording cannot be appropriately performed heretofore.
Therefore, a conventional ink jet recording apparatus is disclosed in which means for detecting the temperature of a recording head is provided and the number of times of preliminary discharge operations is changed according to the temperature detected by the temperature detecting means (see Patent Literature 1).
On the other hand, another conventional ink jet recording apparatus is disclosed in which, in addition to the preliminary discharge operations, idle drive operations of minutely vibrating an ink meniscus in a nozzle are performed to suppress the viscosity increase of ink in the nozzle (see Patent Literature 2).